Past and Present

These past two weeks have been like having an up close and personal revisit from the past. After several years of gradually growing immune to the sound of police sirens, of learning not to flinch when someone calls from the gate outside, of training myself to revisit old memories, old fears, without breaking down and shutting off, it feels like I'm starting all over again. And how can I write when I feel this way? How can I write about the past, as if it's safely nestled in a healed corner of my heart, a mere experience to look back upon without the adjoining fear to accompany it, when it feels like it isn't past anymore - when it feels all too painfully present?

I open up the manuscript file on my computer and I stare unseeingly at the screen. It's so overwhelming. You'd think after all these years I would have grown used to it, facing the seemingly insurmountable mountain of expressing so much with so little time, of putting down feelings and pains and wounds that I've hardly begun to unravel and take apart in my own heart and mind. How am I to share that jumbled mess with the world, and expect them to make sense of it all when I can't even do that?

I still go back to the beginning of my manuscript to write more about my childhood. I don't remember it very well anymore, and it feels almost like another lifetime, a different era. It's easier for me to face those faded but happy memories, to struggle over expressing them than it is to face the actual bulk of the book, which is everything that happened to us from the year 2004 and on. That's the most important part and I mentally shy away from even reading it over. It all seems impossible sometimes. How could I finish writing a book that I don't want to even think about looking at? But I know it's not - "with God, all things are possible" - and it's through His grace alone that I've persisted this long. He will help me. I'll face today by His strength and I'll face the past by His strength. Alone, I would have given up long ago.